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TMW#5

Eight hours of travel through five airports on four airplanes for a quick five hour meeting. Love the smell of jet fuel in the morning, even if it meant leaving my scooter parked outside the airport at 5am (somehow I managed to squeeze in this Apocalypse Now reference twice in as many posts). Even though I don’t like running around airports in search of my next flight, a quick supplier visit such as this one felt extremely rewarding when getting home just before midnight on the same day. I felt that we accomplished more in those few hours that many more hours of e-mails or phone calls would try to achieve, all during a face-to-face meeting over a couple of great Italian style pizzas.

2. Trough of Sorrow

At one point Airbnb was financed strictly by what Joe Gebbia calls “the Visa round” of financing. Joe, the founder of Airbnb, had an idea, was willing to stick with it to the end, and maxed out all of his credit cards to fund his dream. The trough of sorrow, as Joe describes it, is when you have a product that the market is almost ready for, but not yet. Like two metal gears spinning very close to one another, but with just enough space between ‘em to not work. I learned quite a lot about the grit an entrepreneur needs to keep the idea alive in this episode of How I Built This.

Always on the look out for a next Netflix show to watch, this week we stumbled across Ray Donovan and loved it. Well, we’re still loving’ it since there are three ten-episode seasons to take in. Set in Los Angeles, to me Ray Donovan is a modern day Tony Soprano, except with a boat load of class and much more money. But the idea remains the same. Kind of a good guy doing a whole lot of bad stuff for a lot of money.

4. Ray Donovan’s Fake Phone Calls

Alright, I didn’t want to write this much about it, but it really really bugs me so here it is: why hasn’t Hollywood figured out how to film smartphone conversations correctly by now? Hollywood, how is it that you can put a man on Mars on a fake backlot set, but you manage to screw up something as obvious as picking up a fake call?
Season one of Ray Donovan has so many screwed up phone conversations I stopped counting how many times someone picked up a phone with a “call” coming in but the screen still clearly shows all of the apps or didn’t show anything at all. It seemed to be an Android problem because in season two everyone has switched over to iPhones and it looks better now, still not perfect. I know this sounds stupid, but I just know that a simple app written by a kid in high school could have solved this. So what gives?

5. Johammer J1

I’ve seen and even sat on a Johammer J1 scooter long ago, but when I saw it this week in the back of a scooter magazine I couldn’t believe how much that thing cost: €23,090 ($25,225)

Having been around electric scooters for quite some time I know that components aren’t cheap, but hot damn, my newish 2 year old car was about half the cost of this scooter. Amazing.